Building Scalable Compute Solutions with Managed Instance Groups

This course covers the practical and theoretical aspects of working with Managed Instance Groups, a powerful abstraction that provides autohealing and autoscaling. This includes configuring health checks, load balancing and autoscaling policies.

Course info

Level

Intermediate

Updated

Jan 16, 2019

Duration

2h 6m

Description

Two primary attractions of cloud computing are autohealing and autoscaling. Individual cloud VM instances do not come equipped with either of these features, however; for that you need to master a higher-level abstraction, the Managed Instance Group.

In this course, Building Scalable Compute Solutions with Managed Instance Groups, you will gain the ability to instantiate, scale, and actually use Managed Instance Groups on the Google Cloud Platform.

First, you will learn what an instance template is, how it is created, and how it can be used to instantiate either individual instances or an instance group. Instance templates are the basic building blocks of infrastructure automation on the GCP, and can be thought of as blueprints from which a VM instance can be created. You can use an instance template along with a health check and an autoscaling policy to create a Managed Instance Group. In this way, the GCP ensures the uniformity of all instances in the MIG. This allows the service to implement perfect horizontal scaling, in which generic instances enter and leave the group over time.
Next, you will discover how updates and rollbacks are performed, and how individual instances can be debugged in a Managed Instance Group. Finally, you will explore how to configure a Managed Instance Group as the scalable backend for a Load Balancer. The GCP has several load balancing options at different levels of the OSI network stack, and in this course we focus on wiring up an HTTP load balancer to the backend instance group. Load balancers have a lot of moving parts, so this configuration is fairly involved.

When you’re finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of Managed Instance Groups needed to build scalable compute backends that provide both autohealing and autoscaling on the GCP.

About the author

An engineer and tinkerer, Vitthal has worked at Google, Credit Suisse, and Flipkart and
studied at Stanford and INSEAD. He has worn many hats, each of which has involved
writing code and building models. He is passionately devoted to his hobby of laughing at
his own jokes.

Section Introduction Transcripts

Course OverviewHi, my name is Vitthal Srinivasan, and I'd like to welcome to you to this course on Building Scalable Compute Solutions using Managed Instance Groups. A little bit about myself. I have Masters degrees in financial, math, and electrical engineering from Stanford University and have previously worked in companies, such as Google in Singapore and Credit Suisse in New York. I am now co-founder at Loonycorn, a studio from high-quality video content based in Bangalore, India. Two primary attractions of cloud computing are autohealing and autoscaling. Now individual cloud VM instances do not come equipped with either of these features. For that, you need to master a higher-level abstraction, and that is the managed instance group. In this course, you will gain the ability to instantiate, scale, and actually use managed instance groups on the GCP. First, you will learn what an instance template is, how it is created, and how it can be used to instantiate either individual instances or an instance group. Instance templates are basic building blocks of infra automation on the GCP and can be thought of as blueprints from which a VM instance can be created. You can use an instance template, along with a health check and an autoscaling policy to create a managed instance group. And in this way, the GCP ensures the uniformity of all instances in the managed instance group. We'll master all of the aspects of creating and deploying managed instance groups. Next, you will discover how updates and rollbacks are performed and how individual instances can be debugged. As an aside, it is also possible for you to create unmanaged instance groups. These are assembled out of preexisting instances, which may or may not be identical. Finally, you will explore how to configure a managed instance group as the scalable back end service for a load balancer. Now the GCP has several load balancing options at different levels of the OSI network stack. And in this course, we focus on wiring up an HTTP load balancer to the back end instance group. Load balancers have a lot of moving parts, and so this configuration is fairly involved. When you're finished with this course, you will have the skills and knowledge of managed instance groups needed to build scalable compute back ends that provide both autohealing and autoscaling on the Google Cloud Platform.